


It's Not Because the Light Here is Brighter

by Fossarian



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Sexual Content, The Dark Side of the Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 10:45:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13456599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fossarian/pseuds/Fossarian
Summary: Rey says yes to Kylo Ren... and everything that goes with him.





	It's Not Because the Light Here is Brighter

The first action Kylo takes as Supreme Leader of the First Order is to turn the thermostat down.

Rey is cold.

She hadn’t said anything _(she’s not going to complain, she’ll never say a word against Kylo Ren and the First Order again if it’ll keep her friends safe)_ , and she isn’t sure he’d even intuited it through their Force bond. Raised in the sands of Jakku she’s simply never grown accustomed to extreme temperature changes and because the _Supremacy_ is one big machine, it’s necessary to keep it cold. So she’s surprised when she walks into her personal chambers and it’s warm, almost balmy.

A Stormtrooper carries in her dinner and Rey takes it from him sheepishly. That, too, she is trying to get used to. “Has the temperature been turned up?” she asks him.

“Yes, ma'am,” he says. “Your Supreme Leader thought you’d like it.” He pauses and she can sense, even through his mask, his nervousness. “Do you want me to change it back?”

“No, that’s quite all right,” she says, reassuringly. “I was only confused.”

The Stormtrooper retreats before she can ask him anything else. She sits down at her table and eats and thinks about the strange things men do.

+

She watches Kylo go about his day. His long black robes kick out in front of him as he walks. He seems unaware that both his height and demeanour inspire fear in those around him. Fear, and a kind of almost worshipful awe. Because Kylo is the last of a religion that had cloaked itself in mystery even at the height of its power and he has cultivated, either by intention or accident, the epitome of what people believe their savior should look like.

Unlike Rey, in her grease-smudged garbs and single pair of underwear. Even now she understands that, on this side, the deference she receives is an extension of Kylo’s desires. The Stormtroopers seem genuine enough when they answer her, but the few times she’d attempted to socialize they’d looked at her askance and called for backup. Perhaps her reputation precedes her, after all.

So, she watches him, and tries to understand. He is awake at five in the morning and does not go to bed until past midnight. He barely eats, which surely will catch up with him at some point for a man so large. Rey keeps biting down on the urge to scold him. Like everyone else on the ship, she chooses her words carefully.

“You look tired,” she says, when he pauses between meetings to visit her and the light of her bedside lamp deepens the shadows under his eyes.

She had sat up at his arrival, trying to look as though Kylo Ren’s appearance in her bedroom were an ordinary occurrence. He had said she could go anywhere, but she hadn't really believed that until she’d tested it for herself. Kylo - or really Snoke - had been something of an intellectual and there is an entire room of collected volumes from all over the galaxy.

She holds her book to her chest as though Kylo’s intention were to snatch it out of her hands. She’s embarrassed at having been caught out and covers the title _One Thousand Ways to Die_ over her arms. She had thought it was about military tactics. It was, she had discovered to her everlasting shame and curiosity, something else entirely. “To die” could apparently mean any number of things, not all of them unpleasant.

Kylo looks too tired to notice what she’s reading, though. He sits down in the chair beside her bed and says nothing, just stares blank-eyed into space. Rey reaches out for him with the Force but there’s a void where the tumult of his emotions usually resides; he isn’t blocking her, there’s just… nothing. She wants to touch him, to draw him to her lap and have him lay his head there. But she knows he won’t allow it.

“You must sleep,” she says. She does not ask him what is wrong. She doesn’t want to know.

“I will,” he says.

She frowns and her index finger drags back and forth across the pages of the book. “Do you want me to…” She trails off, at a loss for ideas.

Kylo shakes his head, still staring unfocused at the wall. “I just want to be here for a minute. You don’t have to do anything.”

So Rey reluctantly opens her book again and tries to read. He sits like that for maybe a half hour and then leaves. She had not sensed any change in him but the next day General Hux is in an especially good mood and there is no repair damages listed in the account books.

+

Her introduction to a Knight of Ren comes as a bit of a shock.

She’s an hour into a conversation with an especially charming young cadet mopping a floor in the west corridor _(you can call me Bix)_ when she stops short at the insignia emblazoned on his hand. When he laughs at something she says, his hand comes up to run through his hair and she sees it, a tattoo, proud as the devil, etched into his skin. Her stomach goes cold.

He sees the change in her and smiles, showing even, white teeth. “Oh sorry,” he says carelessly. “I had thought you knew.”

“I - are you,” she stutters. “Are you a -”

“A Ren,” he says. “We’re all Knights of Ren here.” He points down the hallway where another man - she had thought he was an electrician - is working beneath the floor panels. He pops his head up to wave.

She has had nightmares about these men. She has felt, in her vision, their efficiency, a cold and unattached professionalism in the tasks at hand that had frightened her more than any bloodlust could have done. For she can understand that, and she cannot understand this. A man with a mop, exchanging his views with her on the merits of using Haysian smelt versus Alderaanian to spark an ignition wire.

She stares at Bix in amazement. His face, still holding the vestiges of baby fat, and his smooth, clean hands - why, it reminds her of Finn, in all his goodness and simplicity. And here this man is telling her he is actually a cold-blooded killer whose reputation has burned its way past that of the Sith?

“I’m sorry you didn’t know,” he says, his smile faltering at her stunned expression.

What can she say? She has just spent the last sixty minutes of her life thinking this guy isn’t so bad. “It’s all right,” she says. “I just, er - I don’t want any of us to get into trouble.” There, using Kylo as a veiled threat is usually effective.

Bix takes her ineffectual attempts at subterfuge with a shrug. “You are safe here. We would follow Kylo Ren into hell.”

He says it with such casual conviction that Rey is left in no doubt of his sincerity, of the depth of his commitment. She shivers a little. With the Force she senses it now, as she had not before, the deep darkness within Bix where it is possible to do terrible things in the name of one man and still retain your sense of self. Bix’s loyalty is to Kylo and not to ideas.

Rey supposes they have that in common.

+

She laughs when Kylo informs her that he wants to visit Jakku.

“Why would you want to do that?” she says. “There’s nothing there. Luke said it’s worse than Tatooine.”

“There’s something about the desert,” he says, in a distracted way that makes her think he’s been dwelling on this for some time. “Vader came from the sands. My uncle… You.”

“A coincidence,” Rey insists. “There are many planets with an arid climate.”

But he won’t let the idea go.

And so to Jakku they went. He asks her to show him around but Rey tells him that the tour of her life will only take five minutes. He just looks at her until she relents. She is as unable to say no to him as he is to her.

Upon her recommendation he has forgone his usual black garb for a more practical white linen. He looks so different in it that Rey keeps glancing over her shoulder, each sight of him a new experience of wonder.

“What?” he says.

“Nothing,” she says, takes a step and then looks back. “You look nice today.”

Wrapped in snowy white, he looks more like a monk than ever. A warrior-priest. A man out of time. He doesn’t know what to do with the compliment and he just says, “Oh,” in a very quiet way.

The truth is he looks more than nice to Rey. The wind has thrown his hair into a thousand tousled curves and the bright, fierce heat of the sands has brought a coppery tone to his skin that the washed-out lights of the galactic ships keeps subdued. It seems right that he should be in the wide open spaces of this place.

Athletic as he is, the winding vertical hills of Jakku pose little problem for him, and Rey is torn between pride and an affectionate contempt for his natural abilities. For Rey, she takes to the hills as though she had never left, dainty and sure-footed as an Endorian mountain goat.

After a while, though, she is not sure which way to go. Not because she is lost but because she doesn’t know what Kylo is looking for. They have left their scout party far behind, a fact that is sure to enrage the very itinerary-happy General Hux.

“Should we go back?” she says, her eyes cataloging the time by the sinking sun.

“Not yet,” Kylo says. He walks past her and continues on until he reaches the sharpest, highest edge of the sand dune. There he stops and looks out at the miles of wasteland below him.

She hangs back, unsure and untrusting of the quiet. She feels the strangest urge to call him, to take his hand and turn him away from the horizon and the expanse of shadows beneath. But he is quite safe where he is standing and it doesn’t make any sense for her to be this worried.

Still, the feeling remains. And the sun slips away from the world and the wind dies to a whisper and Kylo just keeps standing there.

“There’s something in the desert,” he says.

“There’s nothing,” Rey says firmly. “It will be cold soon and we must go back.”

When he doesn’t respond, she prods him with the Force. Only to recoil back in alarm. He is so far away, further than he ever was at any time during the war, when his spirit and his presence were as bright as the sun and as impossible to ignore. Now it’s as if Rey has traveled millions of lightyears from him, and Kylo is nothing but a dot in the sky with no bearing or impact on her life.

He is mere inches from her and there is nothing. Just the silence and the eternal listless rolling of the sand beneath their feet.

“Kylo!”

She screeches his name. He snaps his head around, his hand already on his lightsaber, searching her face and their surroundings, clearly believing them under attack. Rey can’t explain to him that the threat, although very real, is not one he can kill.

She stretches her hand out. “Come away from there,” she says, trying to sound kind but brokering no argument. “You must come back with me now.”

“Yeah,” Kylo says as if coming out of a trance. His little confused frown, not understanding why she yelled at him, almost breaks her heart. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?”

He takes her hand and lets her lead him back, her grip tight and clammy over his fingers. “People will worry about us,” she says. She starts up a babbling stream of irrelevant trivia about native plants and Kylo listens with an eerily complacent calm and they never speak about that moment on top of the dune.

+

Rey is bare as the day she was born and Kylo is looking at her so intently she has to close her own eyes, can’t endure the intensity of his expression. His hands are warm and calloused, curving around her hips and down her ass. He’s quiet and for the most part still, letting her set the pace. She’d think him intellectually removed from the situation if it weren’t for the soft little moans, almost hurt, that escape his throat each time she goes up and then down.

She’s never done it like this, with the girl on top. Hadn’t really known you _could_ do it like this, until she’d read that book. In her experience, from her upbringing on Jakku, women were subordinate to a great many forces more powerful than they and you were lucky if you only had to submit to one of them.

In the book this had been one of the more tame suggestions. She doesn’t know why she had continued reading it, other than following some vague idea of employing the knowledge. Kylo is easy to please, though, and despite her efforts at more elaborate forms of intimacy it all seems the same to him: to be treated with suspicion.

He never asks to touch her, so Rey is forced to be the initiating party. Which she had at first enjoyed, but now worries means that Kylo is simply indifferent to these encounters.

She presses her hands on his chest for leverage and rolls her hips, forgetting the book and her fears, operating on instinct. Kylo makes a surprised noise and grasps her thighs, spreading them apart so he can arch deeper into her.

He’s fraying at the edges and some of his control slips, Rey can feel it in the strength of his hands as he pulls her back down to him, taking over the rhythm.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, his normally rich voice taking on a reedy, breathy quality that Rey delights in.

She’s doing this. The power trip is heady and she knows she shouldn’t feel this way, but it’s hard to think about abstractions when Kylo’s velvety cock is rubbing against her cunt and filling all the aching emptiness in her. He’s good, he’s so good, and if he was ever in doubt of that she pours that feeling into him now. Something for him to remember when those whispering sands call to him again.

He gasps and his grip on her tightens to the point of pain. Rey falls forward and holds him through the shudders, his muscles tense and his skin slick against her own. She continues to hold him even after and he lets her, panting into her ear, and she pushes back his sweat-dampened hair and murmurs soothing nonsense, as she would a nervous horse, until he begins to calm.

She’s surprised he has endured her touch for so long and she doesn’t want to press her luck, so she lets go and slides to the empty space of the bed beside him, her leg still touching his.

After a moment he says, “Why did you do that?” his voice raspy as if he’d been shouting.

All she had done was turn a mirror on him, made him see what she had been feeling. But if she were to explain he would be disbelieving, and the world into which he had been born would be disbelieving, too. For power was a barter system and no one had ever done anything nice for Kylo without wanting something in return.

She reaches up and runs her fingers down the side of his face, avoiding the scar.

“Do what?” she asks innocently.

Kylo had watched the hand coming to his face as though it were a snake meant to bite him, and goes very still at her gentle touch. “That,” he whispers.

There’s a lot of things she could say, a lot of reasons that are true but not the whole answer.

It all comes down to this: “Because I want to.”

When she had said yes to him she hadn’t thought it would be easy. Turns out she was wrong about that, too.


End file.
